IS NOTHING SACRED? Great piece in The Atlantic by Gregg Easterbrook defending the Narnia books from the dark forces of political correctness and corporate white-washing. According to Easterbrook, C.S. Lewis' chief critic in the UK, Philllp Pullman also writes books about precocious children exploring parallel worlds in search of divine truth. Sadly, his stories are a dark mirror image of Narnia--
driven by the premise that God is evil‹a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence followed by hell, even for the righteous. Christian illusions about God are to blame for all the world's miseries; Christianity is "a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all," one character declares. The protagonists in the books strive to acquire ancient, mysterious objects they can use to bring about God's death. Along the way children are tortured and murdered, often with Church approval.
Ugh. No wonder he hates Narnia. He's the anti-Lewis. Another critic accuses Lewis of "corrupting children with allegory." Wonder how he feels about the Wizard of Oz.
YOU WOULDN'T SEE THIS IN AMERICA: The headline, that is, in this story in the British Telegraph: Two white suspects in bin Laden probe. It shouldn't really be so shocking to the Brits, either. For one thing, they have had plenty of experience with white terrorists. For another, Cat Stevens converted to Islam, so why wouldn't other white British guys?
IRONING UPDATE: Unfortunately, steaming your mail does not kill anthrax. The invaluable urban legend debunkers at Snopes have a special Rumors of War site that will also give you the lowdown on whether or not Osama bin Laden owns Snapple.
SMOOSHED: A Danish analysis of breast cancer studies shows that mammograms don't reduce mortality in women of any age. And since women who get mammograms receive 30 percent more lumpectomies and mastectomies, they may do more harm than good. There is a lot of breast cancer hysteria out there, especially considering that heart disease and lung cancer each separately kill more women. Part of the problem is the way that breast cancer has become politicized in the last decade. Thinking that early detection was the answer, the pro-mammography crowd has done everything they could to raise awareness of the disease. It is now clear that this has only served to frighten people, waste medical resources, and hasn't reduced breast cancer deaths.
UPDATE: The Danish study was published in The Lancet today, the leading British medical journal. Now British cancer charities and mammography advocates are up in arms because they fear that it will reduce the number of woman who get screened. Which would be the point of the study and of another which came out this week showing that women greatly overestimate the benefits of screening. They are upset because the Danes discounted as flawed the two studies showing a clear mammography benefit. The researchers found that there had been no properly controlled study which had found a clear link between screening and reduced mortality. Part of the problem with doing adequate studies is that no one wants to be randomly assigned to the "control group" that gets no screening. Hopefully, this new survey will encourage woman to participate in more research which could settle this matter. But the advocates will need to be prepared to accept the possibility that they have been pursuing a useless path for years now. That's hard for anyone to do.
STELLAR stuff from Cathy Young on Reason Online concerning the wacky left's tension between multiculturalism and feminism. It boggles my mind how anyone can possibly claim, when faced with the burqa or with FGM, that all cultures are equal. But there remain those that do. Or who even claim that it is worse for women in the West.
DASCHLE'S ANTHRAX PRANK: Yep, the House is choleric!
JUST CALLED TO SAY... Article in the Christian Science Monitor on defections from the Taliban reveals this exchange:
One hour into a dead-of-night, four-hour march toward "enemy" lines, Cmdr. Galajang Malang couldn't resist radioing his Taliban superior about his planned defection.These defections are occuring frequently and for the most part are confined to mujahideen who had previously defected to the Taliban in 1996. It's not surprising they would choose to leave the sinking Taliban now."It was a big surprise for him," Commander Malang says with a broad smile, just hours after safely crossing rebel lines 30 miles north of Kabul.
He and his 10 dark-turbaned Taliban defectors - armed with their assault rifles and rocket launchers - let out roars of delighted laughter as Malang repeats the dialogue.
"We joined the mujahideen against you!" Malang says he told his dumbfounded Taliban chief, Commander Habib, who pleaded with the soldiers to stay.
"It's finished," Malang says he replied with relish. "We are already with them."
TROUBLING column by Thomas Friedman today in the Times. He was recently forced to check a pair of tweezers before flying. I had thought tweezers were allowed, having flown with a pair of Tweezerman tweezers post-911. To be sure, on the first leg of our trip they were closely examined by security and by my husband, who wanted assurance I had bought them before our marriage. And then on the way home, they were also given the once-over and an opinion from the guard's immediate superior was solicited. But on both trips they were eventually allowed on the plane because they were not scissors. Hopefully Friedman's experience was an aberration. Nothing beats airplane bathroom lights for tweezing. And what am I supposed to use for a weapon should the plane be hijacked? If I have to check my tweezers, won't that really mean that Osama bin Laden has won?
THE EPA says that so many endangered steelhead trout are returning to north-central Washington rivers, they're considering opening season on them. Why not just delist them all together?
Steelhead is great spread with a little coarse-ground dijon mustard, sprinkled with fresh pepper, and broiled for maybe 10 minutes, or until it flakes. Serve topped with this minted tomato salsa. I think it best to use cherry tomatoes-- few things in life are more dependable. Even in Texas in the summer, it can be hard to lay hands on a decent beefsteak tomato. Like its fellow endangered species, salmon, steelhead trout is also a delicious source of Omega 3 fatty acids, but it's not at all salmony. It does have a gorgeous red color.
Neither fish is really endangered, as any trip to a decent fish market will show.
National Review Online's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru have a smart take on Daschle vs. Gephardt in today's Washington Bulletin:
Tom Daschle's decision to reverse course on what he apparently told House leaders Wednesday morning i.e., the Senate would join the House in adjourning must be understood in the context of Democratic party politics. Today Daschle looks like a fearless statesman: His office infected by anthrax, but the majority leader forging ahead with Churchillian resolve. House minority leader Dick Gephardt, on the other hand, saw himself branded a "wimp" on the front page of today's New York Post.Both men are potential candidates for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and one of them just smeared a pie in the face of the other.
It's nice to be able to admire Daschle's handiwork for a change.
POX PARTIES: Creepy story about parents who hold "chickenpox parties" rather than vaccinate their children. This is vaccine-phobia taken to new lows. Chickenpox can develop into some very serious complications and is worse the older you are. I still have some scars from getting chickenpox at 13 and would have loved to have gotten a shot at 6 instead. To a one, vaccines are much safer than the diseases they protect against. They also protect not only the person vaccinated but everyone he could potentially infect.
MORE GOOD NEWS: Americans are reducing their use of high-interest credit card debt and refinancing their mortgages. I wonder if this represents not just the consumer slowdown, but maybe a new financial sobriety.
THE GENERAL: Polls
GOOD THINGS: Iron your mail with steam and a damp cloth to kill anthrax spores. For a Martha Stewart touch, fill your iron with linen water and use an antique flax dishtowel bought at auction. (Williams-Sonoma sells nice water exclusively produced at a small factory in France¹s Provence region. According to the online catalog, "the custom of dampening linens with lightly scented Provençal linen water before ironing is popular in many French households. It makes the linen closet, not to mention the linens, smell heavenly." Just think what it could do for toxic mail.)
Next week: Mix your own generic substitutes for Cipro! Place a two week series in Martha's Extra Scalloped Bags (ribbons sold separately, I think) and distribute to neighbor children.
OUR SAUDI FRIENDS When I saw this headline: Saudis Alarmed by Spate of U.S. Media Attacks, I naturally thought it referred to the anthrax scares, which are starting to alarm me as well. Silly rabbit! The Saudis are upset about the mean things that Seymour Hersh, Mark Steyn, Thomas Friedman, Virginia Postrel, and the InstaPundit, among others have been writing about them. What exactly do they expect after offering us such lukewarm help in the fight against terrorism they have helped sponsor?
SERENITY NOW! Almost in time to protect the Texas N.O.W. State Conference for International Peace, Austin Police Chief Stan Knee has announced the creation of volunteer security patrols as part of our own Homeland Security Division. Our town has had more than its share of anti-Enduring Justice protests, so perhaps our anarchist population makes security concerns all the more important. I rather doubt it, though. They're mostly pretty lame as revolutionaries go, like their fearless leader Robert Jensen. To my knowledge, the most damaging thing they've ever done was keep Kissinger from speaking at UT a couple of years ago.
Speaking of professors, The Austin-American Statesman found one at Sam Houston State University to say that our volunteer patrols are unnecessary:
Sam Souryal, a professor at Sam Houston State University's Criminal Justice Center, said he's heard of no other law enforcement agency in the state with such a program, and he questioned whether the measure was appropriate."I find it very legitimate in wartime," he said. "Would the conditions we are in today justify wartime precautions and provisions? I think it's open for discussion."
Open for discussion? Let's see... lower Manhattan is still smouldering, the House has recessed out of fears over all the funny envelopes of deadly powder the Senate has received, and Congress invoked the War Powers Act more than a month ago. I certainly hope this guy is opening his own mail.
RIPKIN REDUX Great essay by Paul M. Weyrich about whether we will ever have another Cal Ripkin:
So when we say there will never be another Cal Ripken, what is it we are saying? Outside of playing for a single team for an entire career, which under current rules may be next to impossible, why does Cal Ripken represent a by-gone era? Are we saying that there just won't be another player who will try to play in that many consecutive games? Are there no players left who will always refrain from ripping off their employer? Are we saying that there are no players left in baseball with Ripken's degree of humility? Are there no players who care enough about the fans, who, after all, are the ones paying the salaries of the players? Are there no players who will hang around after the game until the stadium lights go out? Are we saying that scandals and cheating are the norm and we should just accept that? Are we saying that it is passé for a player to have a decent family and to be a model citizen? Or perhaps what we are saying is that we might find some of these qualities in a player here and there, but certainly not all of these qualities in one man.It seems to me that rather than accepting the notion that there will never be another "iron man" we ought to instead say to the next generation: "Here was a model ballplayer. He represented the ideal. He wasn't perfect, of course. But his virtues far outweighed his vices. This is how he played the game. This is how he lived his life when he was a ball player. There was never a hint of scandal connected with him. He was not only a good family man but he was interested in and active in his community. Now, Little Leaguers, this is who we want you to emulate if you are blessed enough to go on to professional baseball. We want you to aspire to be the next Cal Ripken. Maybe even a little better than Cal."
BLOWBACK Seems Democratic Chief Terry McAulliffe has had to make a special trip to New York to persuade supporters of Freddy Ferrer, the apparent loser in last week's mayoral runoff, that a hand recount of paper ballots is not in the party's best interest. But many black and Hispanic Ferrer backers see parallels between Mark Green's extremely narrow victory over their candidate in a racially-charged race and the results of the last presidential election, which McAuliffe, and even Green, loudly maintained earlier this year was a conspiracy to disenfranchise Florida minorities. And just like Gore, Ferrer withdrew his concession over the weekend when it was discovered that 40,000 Green votes were double counted. Will Gore's tactics in Florida now become standard operating procedure for losing Democrats?
BASTARDS! I haven't really been alarmed by the inept anthrax attacks, and I'm still not worried. But dammit, now the monsters have infected a baby! Granted it's the cutaneous kind, which isn't deadly, and they didn't target the seven-month-old infant. But this is why you don't leave anthrax-laced items lying around-- kids touch everything!
KHMER VERT Fascinating translation by Thomas Nephew of an article by Hans Christoph Buch in Der Spiegel comparing the Taliban with the Khmer Rouge. Buch doesn't go into the gory details that the former Taliban secret police recruit, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, did in The Telegraph a couple of weeks ago. One would be tempted reading Hassani's confession to think doing such things to another human being would be impossible, if we did not already know that the morally impossible was done by the Khmer Rouge and others.
ECO OPTIMISM I can't believe I haven't mentioned Bjørn Lomborg yet. Week before last, my copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist arrived hot off the presses of Cambridge and it it is extraordinary. A hefty tome of about 515 pages, with 2,930 endnotes referencing over 1,800 sources, it debunks just about every enviro-whacko scare ever detailed in a green direct mailing. Global warming? Check. The cancer epidemic? Check. Mass extinctions? Check. Eminent Malthusian global starvation, landfill crowd-outs, and suffocation from air pollution? Check, check, and...check. Yes, reports of our planet's terminal condition turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Pollution is being reduced, fewer people are starving, fewer Third World children are dying, forests are expanding, and Lomborg has the stats to prove it all.
Numbers, you see, are his specialty at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, where he is an associate professor. In 1997, after reading this enthusiastic Wired interview with the late Julian Simon, he set out with a few graduate students to disprove what he thought was "typical American right-wing propaganda," namely Simon's Panglossian claim that everything is improving except our expectations. Instead of debunking Simon, though, Lomborg debunked his own (and much of the educated world's) pessimistic ideas about the state of the environment. He wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist to set the record straight, and hopefully people will pay attention. It caused a big splash in the Danish media when it was first published there, but now it comes out in America when there's a war on.
Many of the same people who are against this war also accuse the US of raping the planet. Reading Lomborg's book might give them one less reason to hate America.
MIXED REPORTS concerning our food drops. A report from disguntled aid workers labels it "useless," while interviews with hungry Afghans in the north indicate at least partial success in targeted landing and palatability. Refugees in northern Afghanistan are likely to be less starving than those who were under Taliban control, and the food may help them more.
NO COMMENT This one stands on its own. I'm just glad she's ok.
Clinton OK after airport incidentHere's where she was headed.(10/14/01) YONKERS - A bizarre accident at Westchester County Airport involved Senator Hillary Clinton's entourage Sunday.
Sources tell News 12 Westchester that a vehicle in Senator Clinton's security team tried to bypass a mandatory check point at the airport, which has been under a heightened state of alert since the terrorist attacks. A county police officer attempting to stop the vehicle from getting through injured his shoulder. That officer was taken to Saint Agnes Hospital in White Plains, and his condition is not known.
Senator Clinton, who turned 54 Sunday, was en route to board a private jet to an unreleased destination. The former first lady could not be reached for comment.
UPDATE: The headline has been changed to Officer injured by Clinton motorcade. No new details.
NATO SCHMATO Thoughtful analysis from Steven Den Beste on what real friendship among nations means. The British offered their help and support immediately after 911, and they've been more than good for their word-- even firing Tomahawks from one of their submarines on the first day. The rest of NATO hemmed and hawed and sputtered about a "measured response," and only now that the attacks are a done deal are pledging their help. Which we are ignoring for the most part, because we learned our lesson in Kosovo about how much help we could expect from Europe. Den Beste thinks that European voters will feel the snub and ask their leaders why their countries haven't been a better friend to America. I hope that's true and think such pro-American sentiments will most likely come from non-elites and, thus, probably not make any difference.
Smartertimes once again shreds the New York Times this morning. Take a look:
Today's lead New York Times editorial, about Saudi Arabia, says, "The monarchy should crack down on its own corruption and do a better job of distributing the nation's wealth so that economic inequities do not generate new legions of terrorists."Poverty does not necessarily spawn terrorism or any other crime. We've really heard too often lately about the "poor" terrorists, when, in fact, they were largely middle or upper-income, like the spoiled rich kids in the "Weathermen" who attempted to educate America with bombs in the Seventies.The sentence is a real gem in the sense that it captures the New York Times view of economics and foreign policy all at once. For the Times wealth is something to be "distributed" by a country's government. In fact, there has been no government ever that has equitably distributed wealth, and certainly no monarchy. If you give the government wealth-distributing power, corruption and inefficiency invariably follow. In America, rather than having the government "distribute" wealth, we, for the most part, allow the natural workings of markets to distribute the wealth. The wealth distribution is determined by the free actions of individuals and businesses. Sure, the American government redistributes some of the wealth by taxing and spending. But if someone suggested that Washington needed to "do a better job of distributing the nation's wealth," they'd probably be greeted with a chuckle and the announcement that the Soviet Union tried central planning and state socialism and it didn't work. We don't so much think of wealth here as "the nation's"; we think of it as belonging to individuals. The Times seems to think different rules should apply in Saudi Arabia.
Similarly odd is the claim that "economic inequities" generate terrorists. It's unclear how this happens. If the Times is claiming that aggrieved and jealous poor people become terrorists, then, in fact, that is at odds with recent experience; many of the terrorists involved in the recent suicide attacks on America were not poor. Their masterminds certainly were not poor. Osama Bin Laden is a multi-millionaire, and Saddam Hussein's net worth has been estimated in the billions of dollars. Maybe what the Times is getting at is that the economic inequities drive the rich to terrorism. But there are plenty of rich people who have not resorted to terrorism to ease their boredom. The Times editorial writers, to judge by their writing, are among those most upset about economic inequities. Yet they have not resorted to terrorism. If by economic inequity the Times means a large gap between rich and poor, then America has lots of economic inequity but has spawned few terrorists. Saudi Arabia lacks freedom and lacks equality of opportunity. The distribution and income inequality problems there, such as they are, are merely symptoms of those deeper problems.